


The Night Wanderer

by clementizing



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: M/M, Oliver's POV, and boy is he in love, but first there is penance, eventually there is wall sex, mostly fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 14:58:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14191485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clementizing/pseuds/clementizing
Summary: "Sometimes in the evenings, Oliver loses track of how far he has come."Set post-midnight: Oliver wanders, and comes home to Elio.





	The Night Wanderer

**Author's Note:**

> In the time it took for me to read Call Me By Your Name, I somehow managed to leave most of my heart in Crema...a few months later and I'm not sure it's ever coming back! This is my first fic in the fandom and indeed my first fandom for a very long time, so I have major newbie vibes right now. I can't even begin to mimic the genius of Aciman's prose, so I let this fic go my own way - I hope you enjoy it.

Sometimes in the evenings, Oliver loses track of how far he has come. Then it is the light from the house that leads him back to Elio: a soft flicker of fire on the horizon that gathers heat as he gets closer.

He's definitely lost track tonight. There are no fences or locked gates to mark one plot of land from another around here; the orchards and olive groves roll together in one undulating wave. He's long since stopped wearing a watch (either because time moves differently here, or else because he does not want to see that it is passing), but the light has faded to a smudgy blue and the night noises are building to an insistent thrum: it's late, later than he meant for it to be. He wants to be with Elio, and the wanting of what is close but not in reach makes his steps a little faster. The breeze catches and swells in his shirt as he goes. He's pleased. Elio likes to hide his face against his chest and inhale; if he does that tonight, he'll find the scent of the pine, the mist, the lavender, and know all of the places Oliver has travelled to.

When he gets back to the house - the light from which is shimmering, now, closer - Elio might be asleep, or else hiding, a silent invitation. On those nights, he goes through each room calling softly: Elio, Elio, Elio, the way that he might do to lure a shy pet, and on his tongue the syllables of his name will taste like the word tantalise. When he gets close enough that he can feel there's no one else around, he'll say, with relish, "Oliver" instead, and watch for that beloved body to step out of the shadows and into his arms. 

Tonight the humming radio frequency of Elio's presence in his mind has slipped down to a comforting purr. Not hiding, then. Asleep.

*

So here he is, stretched out at elegant angles on the couch: Elio at rest, not play.

Oliver pads barefoot over the tiles of the floor. They have kept an impression of the day's heat which they sigh back at him like warm breath. He chances one cursory look around for the presence of any other bodies, before folding indivisibly into the only one that matters. The smooth plane of Elio's tummy beside his ear cannot be anything but kissed; he obliges wordlessly, no need to announce himself.

"Here he is, my night wanderer, come seeking in the dark," Elio murmurs sleepily. The vibration of his words shakes down through skin to where Oliver is lying in time with the breeze outside rustling feathers through the trees.

No one has ever spoken to him before the way Elio does.

"Ten minutes, you said..."

Elio's teasing him; he can hear the smile, suppressed, spinning gold around the words. He smoothes another kiss, lingering, into the hollow cave of his hip. Anyone could come through and see. Lately he's afraid of the small voice that whispers back to these thoughts: "let them".

"I'm not going to nag you," Elio tells him magnanimously. His long fingers catch in Oliver's hair to bring him closer and Oliver secures his shirt away from his bare stomach by pressing his forehead to the hem.

"I would love it if you did," he says, "A whole house of your nagging, I'd buy it..."

It's true. If his Heaven is a few steps away in the darkening garden beyond the door, then let it be made incarnate in a lifetime of Elio teasing, taunting, turning over so that Oliver is half caught beneath him like this. If he wanted to, he could move under him a little more and breathe heat through to the bare skin of his thighs, or hips, or other places, even. To stop himself, he sits up and knows from the way Elio folds gracefully over with him, his cheekbone pressed neatly to Oliver's shoulderblade, that this is what had been intended all along. Oliver wraps his arm gently around Elio's slip of a waist where it rests over his shoulder and speaks into his skin.

"What is this, hm?"

Elio's fingers trace a thoughtful circle over his spine.

"Penance," he says indistinctly, the word a wet mist of feeling through Oliver's shirt.

"This is your idea of penance, huh? To carry you for all of time?"

Elio wriggles closer on his shoulder, trying not to laugh.

"You'll never walk again," Oliver promises, "You'll have feet like velvet."

He grabs for Elio's feet where they're resting on his thigh and lets his fingertips dance lightly over the soles. The effect is instantaneous: Elio half-kicks away from him, trapped in Oliver's grip as he breaks into bright peals of laughter that ring through the house so clear and bright it's like church bells ringing.

*

When Elio laughs this way, Oliver can hear the child in him, not very far beneath the surface at all. Once, early in the summer, Annella had ushered him out of the simmering midday sun and shown him an old album of Elio's baby pictures, hiding at the top of a dusty shelf. He had been flattered at first, touched by the overflow in her affection for her son, recognising that she would not have shown him the soft heart of her feelings if she hadn't already grown to like him in a way that went beyond that of two people who must rub along through six weeks together.

He had been far less prepared for the swell in his own heart as he thumbed through the pictures; he had asked her curious questions about Elio's childhood that he had never known he needed the answers to until then, because she was the only person in the world who had held Elio from the true start of him, who had known him when he was just a small miracle of cells. At the culmination of it all he had watched as if from outside himself as his thumb swept the curve of Elio's two-year-old cheek, longingly, under the thin plastic film of the photo album. Then at once he had frozen, knowing she of all people would not see it for anything other than what it was.

"Oliver," she had said evenly.

He could not look at her then, afraid to see the knowledge writ clear in her eyes, but her hand on his cheek was cool and kind; she might have been his mother too in that moment.

"Samuel and I are very glad that we chose you," she had told him, "and we are glad that Elio, in his own way, has chosen you too."

*

It is the end of Elio's laughter that brings him back to himself, and the light weight of him as he wiggles off of Oliver's shoulder and lands in his lap, knees pressed at either side of his hips, still breathing hard, cheeks pink from the head rush, eyes shining. The moment they look at each other all of the playfulness is gone and the promise of the night is wild and without end.

"I haven't seen your face since I got back," Oliver says, very softly. Elio is almost golden in this light.

"Has it changed?" he asks shyly.

Oliver cups his hand to the softness of Elio's cheek. He doesn't have to feel it through fifteen years and a photo album any more.

"No," he says nakedly, "Still very lovely."

He can feel the constellation of heat gather under his palm; Elio is blushing for him, as he does every night now, one way or the other. Oliver thumbs his jaw gently to one side and leans forward until his lips catch the intricate swirl of his ear when he speaks.

"What do you want to do?" he asks.

"Go to sleep in your arms," Elio says immediately. 

"Then that's what we'll do."

Elio curls into Oliver's chest, looking up at him as if through dreams already.

"Will you really carry me?" he whispers. He plants one hand delicately on Oliver's chest. The pad of his finger is exactly over the point of his pulse and he knows Elio can feel it, quicker now.

"Always," he says.

Quicker.

*

He carries Elio like this: with one hand buried in the luxuriant spill of curls over his shoulder and the other wrapped just below his thighs where they lock around his waist. He loves the feeling of Elio's arms draped around his neck, of Elio's face nuzzled in against his throat, but most of all he loves the utter surrender of him in this moment. This is not the same body that performs at the piano, nor that trades in confessions at the Piave or shrugs away from his touch during a game. Elio has shed that skin and what is here, underneath, in Oliver's arms, is something entirely other: Elio's private self. It is private. Once Elio had said that to him, and then it had meant do not enter and thoughts guarded jealously in Elio's journal that were not for him to know, and the uncertainty of his gaze when it spilled on Oliver's arms or palms or bare waist in the garden.

Now it was translated into new language, and meant this instead: the soft glint of the chains around their necks when they were close enough to kiss, holding his hands around Elio's cigarette when he lit it even if there was no real need, his own thoughts pressed as a note under his door but miraculously in Elio's writing rather than his own. It meant midnight and everything that came after and the singular moment before where Elio had told him: I'm nervous. It meant the exact quiet of their bedroom right now, which he knew would soon be broken, like so much glass, by the sounds Elio would make if he touched him this way or that.

Through the open window, he can see the twilit garden and beyond it, the rolling hills speckled with trees, twisting away towards the distant promise of the sea. He had been somewhere in the midst of that, the night wanderer, not so long ago.

But he has other journeys to make now.

*

Elio watches Oliver's fingers descend along each button of his shirt as if surprised by the revelation of his own bare skin. They don't kiss, not yet, so that Elio's nakedness can be prose rather than post script; even then, Elio makes a sound in his throat when he is shirtless with Oliver's hand resting flat on his chest, as if to say that it is too much already. Oliver slides his hand down gently and feels how hard Elio is, and he knows the precise helplessness of it because he is exactly the same, because they are exactly the same.

He undoes everything then, buttons, belts, zips, and pushes it away so that Elio is kneeling completely bare before him in all of his symmetry. He is so aware of his own clothes then, the irritation of cloth on heated flesh, the way Elio's quick breaths are pressing his shirt against his chest with every needy inhale. When he eases him down onto his back his eyes have blown wide and dark with wanting and still Oliver does not kiss him, must not kiss him yet, even though his control is a paper-thin thing that Elio could snap at any moment, into so much dust in his hands, if he wanted to.

He slides down the full, languorous length of Elio's body and brushes his lips over the arch of his foot, runs his tongue into the secretive dip of skin inside his ankle, licks the place just behind his knee where the skin is so tender, like the inside of ripe fruit, which they both know something about these days. One hand wraps easily most of the way around Elio's thigh; he spreads both like the covers of a book, front and back, Elio's body a whole and lovely story before him, fresh and unblemished and hungry to be read.

Oliver ushers the shaking in his thighs away with his mouth, slides his hand so that one finger is lying exactly in the fold of his groin and feels his body give one single emphatic jolt at the contact. Already there is a thin crown of pearls around the head of Elio's cock; when he bends to taste them, Elio makes no sound because the feeling runs too deep for that, but the sudden arch of his back is an exclamatory point in itself and a moment later he does sob because Oliver takes him deep, all the way, still shocked by his body's own reaction to this, how the desire sparks at the base of his spine and sets a low, insistent burn.

It's long minutes like that, Elio's hands clinging in his hair and the rhythm of his breathing falling apart, until he feels the moment where neither of them can stand it any longer and pulls away to kiss Elio, desperately, as if it is the last thing he will ever do, or else just the last thing that matters.

*

After that he's gentle, lets Elio have the full run of his kisses whilst he teases his fingers over the heart of him, presses in slowly and catches Elio's gasp in his mouth, licks it away with a flick of his tongue that sends a soft flush rising on Elio's chest. Somewhere along the way Oliver has lost all of his clothes and he hisses at Elio's hand on him, warm and rhythmic, almost too much with Elio already writhing onto his fingers. He closes his eyes against the tide and buries his face into the endless stretch of Elio's neck, listening to his heartbeat, which is now just so much rolling thunder throbbing under his ear. He marks it with a kiss that bleeds into a deep bite and Elio moans and clings to him and whispers please, please, please.

If he had to ask then maybe this is the part where he would say do you trust me, but instead it is so bright and clear in Elio's eyes that he finds his answer shining there and neither of them says a word when Oliver takes Elio back into his arms like before, scoops him off the bed as if he is weightless and walks him over, next to the open windows. The breeze is deliciously cool on his skin and Elio sighs into it, lets Oliver crowd him in against the wall, makes the breath catch in his chest when he runs his hand in one voluptuous, devotional sweep down over the lean muscles of his back. All his life Oliver had grown up with people telling him he was beautiful, but he had never once felt it until he had come to Elio's bed.

Even though they're kissing when he pushes inside, Elio's cry still sounds as if it has been torn from a secret place inside him that even Oliver has not yet discovered, and he listens to it slide out into the night and shiver the stillness of the air. He can't find it in himself to be worried about it, can't find it in himself to do anything but hold Elio so close that he can feel their hearts trying to beat into each other and think how he wishes they could have that perfect, total synthesis, wash away this inconvenient glitch of nature which saw fit to split them into two. Elio tightens delicately, deliberately around him and in some vague other world he sees himself catch the billowing white curtains in his hand and squeeze the air from them with the force of his feelings.

Pleasure loosens Elio's tongue to its Latin root and he speaks mostly to Oliver in Italian now. He sometimes catches fragments of it - I, you, yes, my, Elio ever-possessive - but mostly he has little sense of the words; it is only the emotion of them that plants and buds and flourishes. Still he sobs when Elio tips his head to one side, holds his face so that it is only the relentless rhythm of their hips that keeps them joined together and speaks to him, the beat liturgical, vowels bursting at the seams with the weight of his wanting, Elio's soft voice suffused with such a fierceness that he knows buried in the pretty swoops and swirls of his words there are darker fruit blooming. 

They come together, Oliver shaking at the intensity which builds so far beyond the point his pleasure would once have tipped over at that it is as much relief as release that drives him, Elio's whole body alive with sensation in his arms even as he loses his language to low, soft moans that run soul-deep and aching. When Oliver carries Elio this time it is not just because it pleases him but also because he must, Elio now a gentle wreck of himself in his arms.

*

They lie together with Elio's body enveloped in Oliver's, the fragile arch of his spine sheltered in the cave of Oliver's chest. He eases one thigh between both of Elio's and sees how they blend together, milk and honey, picks up a scent like that from the hollow of Elio's neck too, where his chin is resting. He flutters his eyelashes over one so-high cheekbone and smiles at the shiver he gets in return. He could lie like this and trade hands back and forth with Elio's senses forever.

The curtains catch again in the restless breeze and strain ghost-like towards them, white fingers beckoning, and when they fall away there is that startling view again, Oliver's new territory. Perhaps it came to this: that he longed to be part of the landscape, to always be seen and constant here, even when he no longer was.

"It is very beautiful," Elio says quietly, into Oliver's wrist, which he is kissing.

"Did you notice it before?"

"I did, sometimes, but...I was used to it, I guess. Having you here makes me see it again."

Oliver thinks about how much he had wanted Elio with him tonight.

"Will you come with me tomorrow?"

"Yes," Elio says simply; then, smiling, "We can be late back together rather than apart." 

He turns to Oliver and traces his fingers lingeringly over the bow of his lips, as though he is something rare or precious, or both. 

"You sleep now," he says tenderly, and leans in to kiss both of his eyes closed.

Lying here like this, drowsy and quiet with the first birds beginning to sing and the fading moonlight painting strange shadows over their entwined skin, Oliver has no sense of two bodies sharing space. There are just, at last, all parts of himself, some of which he might once have had to wander for.


End file.
